CHA is starting a book club for Catholic health care leaders called "Reading the Signs of Our Times."
The book club includes six sessions, starting Dec. 19. Participants will receive six books, or eBooks if they prefer, that touch on essential elements of the Catholic health care ministry: ethics, mission, formation, advocacy, sponsorship and well-being.
The hourlong virtual sessions, which will be held bimonthly at 1 p.m. ET Tuesdays, will each be led by a CHA expert on the book's topic.
The book club follows the success of an ethics book club CHA hosted from October 2022 through August. About 120 people participated, and some said they would love to do it again, but with a wider subject range of books.
"I think that people just appreciate it, coming together as a group and discussing something of importance to their work," said Brian Kane, CHA's senior director of ethics. "This is one of the reasons why we decided to do something a little bit more variable this year — we had people from lots of different aspects of Catholic health care. We had some ethicists, we had some mission leaders, we had pastoral care people, we had some clinicians — it was a real mix of people."
Authors of the books participated in some of the ethic book club's sessions. Some authors will participate in the new group's gatherings, too, including O. Carter Snead, who wrote What it Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics. That book will be discussed at the first session.
The other dates and books are:
- Feb. 20 — The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
- April 16 — Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness by Ilia Delio
- June 18 — Unlikely Entrepreneurs: Catholic Sisters and the Hospital Marketplace by Barbra Mann Wall
- Aug. 20 — Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World by Dr. Vivek Murthy
- Oct. 22 — Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams
The registration fee is $175 for CHA members and nonmembers. For more information or to register, click here.